Intel has officially revealed its Intel On Demand program, which will activate certain accelerators and features of the CPU again generation The company’s Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids.
The new pay-per-use program will allow Intel reduce the number of models it launches on the market while taking advantage of the technologies it offers. In this way, your customers will be able to upgrade their machines without having to replace hardware or offer additional services.
The next processors Xeon Intel’s fourth-generation Scalable Sapphire Rapids are equipped with several special-purpose accelerators and security technologies that not all customers need at all times.
To give those end-users additional investment flexibility, Intel will offer them to buy the CPU with those capabilities turned off (at a slightly lower price), but turn them on if they ever need them (for a fee).
Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) technology also will allow Intel to sell fewer CPU models and then allow your customers or partners to activate certain features if they need them (business as a service).
The list of technologies that Intel wants to make available on demand includes: Software Guard Extensions, Dynamic Load Balancer (DLB), Intel Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA), Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA), and Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT).
A very bad idea that will not affect the new generation
Since Intel On Demand technologies are targeted at completely different workloads, very few customers will need them all at once. But as their data centers scale, they may need some of them, which is when On Demand capacity comes into play.
The formal deployment of the Intel On Demand program leaves more questions than answers. We don’t know how much Intel intends to charge to enable certain features or how much their customers will want to initiate them by going through the checkout…again.
For now, Intel’s On Demand program is reserved for servers, and hopefully it will remain the prerogative of Xeon platforms. Meanwhile, Intel back in the day offered software upgrades for its desktop processors to make them more powerful.
Fortunately, That program faced criticism from buyers (gamers and professionals) so they dropped this business idea.. A future where we have to pay for all kinds of subscriptions, even the performance of our Intel processor, doesn’t sound very good.